This Jan. 11, 2014 file photo shows actress Gwyneth Paltrow, left, and her husband, singer Chris Martin at the 3rd Annual Sean Penn & Friends Help Haiti Home Gala in Beverly Hills, Calif. Paltrow and Martin are separating after 11 years of marriage.

Photograph by: Colin Young-Wolff
, Invision/AP, File

The “conscious uncoupling” mocked round the world has inspired plenty of questions in recent days, such as what that term actually means and whether Gwyneth Paltrow has been ingesting too many chia seeds.

The right one, however, may be to ask about the extent to which the actress’s separation announcement – which more closely resembles a brunch invitation – signals a broader evolution in the way people are entering into, and ultimately exiting from, marriage. In Canada, for example, social trends have shifted so profoundly that The Vanier Institute of the Family is considering re-naming its ongoing research series on the subject.

“You can’t call it ‘Causes and Consequences of Divorce’ anymore; you have to talk about it as coupling and uncoupling and re-coupling and de-coupling. It’s something we’ve been thinking about for a while,” said Nora Spinks, CEO of the Ottawa-based think tank.

Between 2006 and 2011, the number of common-law couples rose 14 per cent, more than four times the increase for married couples. Nearly one in five divorces finalized in 2008 were for marriages five years or fewer in duration. And given current patterns, 41 per cent of married couples won’t make it to their 30th wedding anniversary – up from 36 per cent in 1998.

“The idea of having one partner for life goes back to when our lives were much shorter,” said Spinks, noting that it’s increasingly common to see people choose different partners for different stages of adulthood.

“Today, we have more individual autonomy to make decisions about health and happiness and wellbeing, and we don’t tie ourselves to the same concept of failure: ‘The marriage failed,’ ‘I failed.’ Maybe you just grew.”

Importantly, Spinks said Canadians continue to enshrine the idea of a lifelong soulmate. In practice, however, it’s not always easy to achieve, as the plummeting marriage rate has demonstrated over the past three decades.

Ben Zimmer, a noted lexicographer, said this disconnect is reflected in ongoing changes to the language around relationship dissolution.

“It makes sense to try to find a new set of terms and vocabulary to get away from the fraught taboos of separation and divorce,” said Zimmer, executive producer of Vocabulary.com. “There’s a lot of therapeutic talk around this issue, encouraging people to think about these things not as single events but as an ongoing process.”

In fact, Zimmer found a reference to “uncoupling” as a synonym for divorce as early as 1942. So why is Paltrow, whose sepia-washed split announcement used the contentious term, getting so much flak?

Pop culture commentator Shauna Wright said the fuss has more to do with the actress than her soft-focus lens on separation. But the latter didn’t help.

“Why can’t she just, for one minute, be human? Honestly, I don’t think she knows how,” said Wright, co-founder of celebrity news site Blabberazzi. “Talk like a normal person and people will treat you with the compassion and empathy that normal people tend to get; if you want to stay up in the ivory tower, then use terms that people who don’t pay $300 to talk to a psychologist don’t get to use.”

Kristen Mark, a long-term relationships researcher, considers Paltrow and husband Chris Martin’s implied enlightenment to be PR posturing. Nevertheless, she said there’s merit to the idea that leaving a marriage doesn’t have to be ugly.

“They’re saying it’s more than an amicable break-up; it’s a joint life decision,” said Mark, assistant professor at the University of Kentucky. “I like that they’re trying to make it less of a negative thing, because divorce doesn’t have to be negative.”

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